This poll is making fun of marketing "terms" and buzzwords - and for good reason.

Businesses like to make their products seem more unique than they are, to make them seem to add more value than they do and to make it sound more important than it is; hence the buzzwords and nonsensical phrases. These buzzwords are also there to obfuscate exactly WTF you are looking at and make it more difficult to comparison shop between "solutions" or as I like to call it: overpriced software. They can't call it an accounting and inventory package. No, it's got to be an enterprise resource planning software or some such thing. Can't call is a sales program - go to call it "Customer Relationship Management" package. I think I start my software company and call my "solution" CYUTA (Cute-Ah) - Charge You Up The Ass.

One of my all time pet peeves is the term "price point" - they can't just say "the price"; no it has sound like some sort of scientific data point. And unfortunately, I'm hearing regular folks using that "term" in everyday conversation now.

Don't get me started on "preexisting" - talk about a stupid made up work that has become a real word. That word was invented by someone in the medical insurance industry - I guess they couldn't say, "We will not cover illnesses that existed before this policy was purchased" or what have you.

One of my all time pet peeves is the term "price point" - they can't just say "the price"; no it has sound like some sort of scientific data point. And unfortunately, I'm hearing regular folks using that "term" in everyday conversation now.

Not sure what the problem is with this really. Use of the term "price point" implies a relation between a certain level of features/benefits and the cost to the purchaser. It also tends to imply that there will be a cluster of competing products or services that offer similar features and are at around the same price - a price point.

The reason for this is that it's cost prohibitive for manufacturers to produce and market a near infinite number of items with various combinations of features to satisfy everyone, and so they choose a set number of products to manufacture, each targeting a specific demographic or price point, with features to match. Their competitors do much the same thing, and what results is a set of discrete price points at which you can buy a given item with an associated set of features, with not much in between.

e.g. Customer: "Hey, can't I buy a DSLR for $Y that has $A feature I want?"Store Sales Guy: "Sorry, they don't manufacture them at that price point. You either have the entry level types for $X and the cheaper prosumer types at this price point up here at $Z. If you want that feature you'll have to fork out a lot more."

e.g. Customer: "Hey, can't I buy a DSLR for $Y that has $A feature I want?"Store Sales Guy: "Sorry, they don't manufacture them at that price. You either have the entry level types for $X and the cheaper prosumer types at this price point up here at $Z. If you want that feature you'll have to fork out a lot more."

Oh I wish, I wish, I could get George Carlin's ghost here to finish this post!

I arranged a seance to get Carlin's opinion and his response was...

"Aaaaawaaaaaargh! Aaaaargh! Make it stop! Make it stop!....Oh, you have stopped?.... Only long enough to let me get my message out to all the fag-enablers of America? Okay then....I have only one thing to say... Fred Phelps was right. I *am* in hell and forever writhing and screaming in exquisite pain- and I wish I'd listened to the Word of God when I was alive. If you don't want an eternity of being sodomised by red hot pokers where the sun don't shine then.... repent, all you people, repent while you still can. And join the Westboro Baptist Church."

"Oh no, not the poker again..... aaaaaawwwwwaraaaaaargh!"

Thank you Mister Carlin. Thanks also to Joe Bigot of the Westboro Baptist Church for his generous assistance in carrying out this seance.

price != price point. "price" is the specific dollar (or currency of your choice) amount attached to a single product. "price point" is a small range of prices attached to a category of product, generally used to classify product ranges.

That said, buzz words often do have real meanings and appropriate times to use them. For example, a properly run organization does experience synergy, in that a group of employees when properly managed and empowered by the organization will be more effective together than if

In business it makes a lot of sense to have the vocabulary to distinguish between the continuous price on for example a demand curve [wikipedia.org] and the discrete price points you offer products at, in fact it's a very important part of positioning your models against the competition's but to the consumer it's completely redundant since they're only offered discrete prices. Everywhere you would use price point you could use price with zero chance of confusion. And if you're using price to mean an exact price and a price

The price of the softwaremax(([Cost to keep the company running]/Customers)*1.2, [what the market will tolerate])

Making software isn't cheap. ((([Programmers Salary]*1.4)*[Number of programmers]+([Managers Salary]*1.4)*([Number of programmers]/6))+[Rent]+[Utilities])*[Length of time to develop]+([10% of Final Product price to sales commission]*[units sold])+([Support Personal]*[Units sold]/20)

And if you sell it to a Business then that means you are probably selling less copies, then with the general masses,

A marketing company doing some work for us called our web site a 'Value Added Touch Point'!I was telling my wife about the 'marketing land meeting' while we were driving when I needed to connect my ipad to her iphones Personal Hot Spot.We both looked at each other and burst out laughing thinking her personal hot spot would be a great value added touch point!

Reminds me of the Ronald RayGun years, and the "word" proactive. It seems to have been made up by someone who didn't know the difference between "act(ion)" and "react(ion)".

But there's a difference between active and proactive. Someone who's active does a lot of stuff. If you're reactive you do stuff in response to issues that come up. Someone proactive does stuff anticipating issues that may otherwise come up. That's a useful distinction to be able to draw...

People have been complaining LOUDLY AND REPEATEDLY about/. becoming too "business"-y, too commercialized, too mainstream. See the whine-fest about/. TV, or SlashBI, or all the polls that seem to be nothing more than advertising research.

The people running the show are trying to show that they've noticed, by making a poll that is a) the embodiment of what the haters are hating, and b) makes absolutely no sense. Seriously, "cloudify"?

Unfortunately, Poe's Law applies here as well - you cannot make a satire of something so stupid that no one can mistake it for sincerity.

In the real world, people with complaints are the most likely to step up and scream.

I've never seen a poster firing off an all caps scream of "I LOVE WHAT YOU'RE DOING! KEEP IT UP!"

I, too, mourn the days when Slashdot was all about technology and hardware. But you know what? My last several jobs haven't been about the technology and hardware, either.

For the most part, bread and butter business programming has been pretty much stable for the past decade or so. We get bigger faster hardware, we glue on web interfaces, but the core business systems don't really change all that much.

The same is true of most commercial products. "Updates" are released that implement the latest and greatest UI metaphors from the desktop world, web services shift from static HTML to AJAX enabled "HTML5" interfaces, but the core logic and business needs are the same.

It's been over 7 years since I worked on a project that was developing something completely new. The heyday of creativity and bit-twiddling are gone. Programming has gone mainstream, and it's all about integration, customization, and configuration of canned packages or enhancing existing custom applications nowadays. There just aren't a heck of a lot of new requirements from the business world.

So in a market where the majority of canned package requirements have been met for a decade, the vendors and project managers are left to compete on buzzwords, because there really is nothing to differentiate their products other than brand name and cross-product affiliations, much like the mid-size car market.

Oh, so true. It was sent by the new copy and poll editor that Slashdot just picked up from Car Talk, Morden A. Groener. Unfortunately, his health insurance hasn't kicked in yet, so he's been off of his meds. I'm sure he'll get his game on eventually.

People have been complaining LOUDLY AND REPEATEDLY about/. becoming too "business"-y, too commercialized, too mainstream. See the whine-fest about/. TV, or SlashBI, or all the polls that seem to be nothing more than advertising research.

The people running the show are trying to show that they've noticed, by making a poll that is a) the embodiment of what the haters are hating, and b) makes absolutely no sense. Seriously, "cloudify"?

Unfortunately, Poe's Law applies here as well - you cannot make a satire of something so stupid that no one can mistake it for sincerity.

So...

Are you still interested in Dynacorps new range of dynamic honed fishtank filters? Please view our marketing material so we can justify the marketing budget needed to bombard you with more. Along with our excellent range of fishtank filters, Dynacorp offers a new range of cloud-centric streak free tank glass.

I take it you haven't actually taken a good look at SlashBI? Or does it merely contain non-sense that you are trained to not question but cloudify triggers you because you haven't been exposed enough yet?

(Checked comments before polling, just to be sure): it's satire, as indicated by others, but in bad taste. Mostly because/. has a lot of IT visitors who have to deal with these kinds of justifications on a daily basis.

So I offer a solution: run it through the xkcd rng, and select that number.
If I'm not mistaken, "exemplify tomorrow's best technology, today." is the appropriate answer. Sadly, I have no idea what that means. Call the marketing department, or better yet, don't.

I assume that by this you mean that Slashdot has adopted a business strategy that employs a new paridigm such that going forward the core competency Vis-Ã-vis the user-facing empowerment and data aggregation solution is convergent with a scenario that is inconsistent with user expectations.

I don't read/. for robust business solutions, I read it to learn interesting things. Leave the marketing to your other "web properties", this one (/.) wasn't made for that. You're killing your readership with these polls and crap.

In all fairness, it's hard to tell. That "slashdot pulse" stuff has been posting questions of this quality for quite some time. Add in the slashtv and slashbi crap, and it's actually plausible that they are trying to leak more of this crap into the mix.

It's a sad state of affairs when something so blatantly stupid is close enough to the day to day stuff that it becomes hard to recognize it as a joke. Even a few years ago my first reaction to this post would have been to laugh. My first reaction today was "oh great, and so it continues". Stuff has gotten so bad that this only stands out as slightly more extreme than normal.. and that's really bad.

I fully expected the "Vote" button to link me to a whitepaper on measuring ROI on webscale bundles. It would've been funnier if I hadn't seen more enterprise-y polls in full earnestness elsewhere on the web recently.

Isn't it obvious that the entire point of the poll is to make fun of Dilbertian corporate-speak? How could anybody read the choices and conclude otherwise? I read some of the gripes above about people thinking they're being subject to marketing research, and just have to think: "whoosh!"

A few years ago it would have been obvious. With the trend over the last little bit (slashdot pulse, sponsored "ask slashdot", slashbi, etc..) this only stands out as slightly more extreme. It's a sad state of affairs that this didn't immediately provoke a "lol, suits are idiots". I can't be the only person who read it twice and had to decide whether it was a joke or yet another stumble down the slope. Hopefully the editors will read something into that.

I no longer need a robust business solution. Of course, when I was working, I was never in position to pick what software my company used because I avoided manglement like the plague, but now I don't care what software any company uses. That's why I voted for the software with the best marketing swag, because that's the only part of the I'd find useful, provided that I could get my hands on some.

A computer is a solution to a business problem in the same way a car is a solution to my transportation needs. Ergo, when I go to purchase a new car, I do not say, "Gee, I'd love that four-on-the-floor solution with the blue pin striping." Solution is a freaking marketing term. It's not an industry term. Stop using it!

to a particularly bad manager I had to work for. She spouted this gibberish every chance she got, to the point where we started playing buzz word bingo in (stupidly long) meetings. She'd get pretty upset when someone would shout "Bingo!" in the middle of her rants and at one point tried to fire the entire IT dept en masse. The best part is that she got fired because the boss got sick of her buzzwords and when he told her to knock it off, she told him he needed to educate himself and get with the times. His ensuing reaction was absolutely amazing to witness, I still smile every time I walk by her old office.